The politics of language design (lixcon2026)

This talk is about Elpe, a mixture of ideas from Nix, Docker and Ubuntu/Debian/RHEL, with a strong focus on performance and security. I'll talk about the design choices I've made, and demo the thing and about how choices that may seem purely technical can have extreme political consequences. I'll also explain how such choices can have deep and lasting consequences on the dynamics of growing organisations. Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 about this event: https://pretalx.dgnum.eu/lixcon-2026/talk/HVZTB9/